


Olly Olly Oxen Free

by bluebloodbruise



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: A lot of talking, Angst, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, well as slow as you get in a one-shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-07 09:31:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19082287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebloodbruise/pseuds/bluebloodbruise
Summary: “How did it feel? Falling. To you.”“It did not feel like this.”“This?”“Love. To me. This is.”





	Olly Olly Oxen Free

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Copperore](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Copperore).



> A friend fell in love and I obliged her.

“Do you think it is worth it?”

From a hill, they oversee a vigorous battle in the damp woods of Northern England. Bodies and metal can be heard crashing through the milky fog. 

“What? War?”

“No,” the angel amends without turning. “Love.”

The demon shrugs. “I wouldn’t know. Not my division.”

“But you must see so much of it,” the angel presses on, unusually keen. “Love crimes and that sort of thing.”

“I mostly see the aftermath,” the demon admits, regarding the first rising star. Venus is it? Have mortals found about that in this century? “Betrayals and murders and the lot.”

“Suicides too, I would imagine.”

“Oh yes, loads. Although—,” and at this he turns to face the angel who remains pivoted away. “I don’t know if I’d call any of that love. Would you?”

“How would I know? I am an angel!”

“Well, isn’t love in your purview then?”

“Not like _that_.” The angel waves his hands, over the battle, above the air, between them. “Messy and writhing and bloody.”

On the field, limbs mixed with fallen horses, guts and iron soaking the soil. No, the demon imagines, not quite like that.

“Humans do tend to make a mess out of things,” he finally concedes, frowning. Far away a crow caws and they both around turn to track it.

“Anyway,” the angel runs a hand over his large, pristine feathers, smoothing them down. He sounds particularly certain now, resorted back to his ancient resolve. “It must feel terrible.”

“What must?”

“The falling.”

“Ah,” the demon rejoins, crossing his arms and turning away. “That.” 

“Can’t reach love without falling, they say.”

The demon looks at the humans, at their dead and dying bodies partitioned on the cold ground. 

“They do say that, don’t they? In King’s English at least.”

“Hmm,” the angel hums, deep and heavy, as if contemplating a superlative mystery. “Isn’t language a strange thing?”

“Love doesn’t seem any less strange,” the demon grouses just as the leader of his battalion falls down, face first in the mud. He has a wife who will miss him, rare occurrence, and three beloved daughters ripe for being tempted into an early grave. If he so cared to pursue those options. Which he should, if he is to keep up a clean, sober record, undistracted by such mundane considerations as love and war and worth.

“Oh well. I wouldn’t know,” the angel mutters at last, his voice slightly askew, so slightly the demon shouldn’t have been able to hear it. "With all the ‘falling’ and all. _That_ , I would expect, must be your division.”

Lifting the visor off his helmet, the demon regards the angel closely. He seems to grow smaller and whiter every time they meet. Brighter too, if brightness had the soft texture of wool and mead. The demon regards the angel while the mortals kill themselves in someone else’s sword, by someone else’s words, and his breastplate hurts in a way it never did before—and he should know, he who never needed armor. 

He looks at the angel’s profile until the angel turns to face him, eyebrows raised, mouth pinked and intrigued, and then the demon says because then he knows it to be true,

“Yes. I believe _that_ is.”

 

*****

 

“I met a fellow here the other day.”

They are sitting side by side on a town square somewhere in Denmark, weathering a gloomy winter’s day. The angel has rapturously embraced the nineteenth century’s panache for dyed fabrics and floral prints, and the demon—cold-blooded and streamlined—finds himself endeared by such exuberant taste in clothing.

“Did you?”

“A writer,” the angel clarifies, bitting into some grapes. “He was having scones and I. Well, I was having a small lunch, a simple bread and butter with lingonberry confit. I am rather fond of berry jams I will have you know and—“

“And?”

“He wrote a story,” the angel continues undeterred, oblivious, a tad too close. “About a mermaid, or so he said. A mermaid that gives her voice and tail away so she can go on shore and court a prince she once saved from drowning.”

“Seems an ill-advised plan to me.”

“Well, having found the prince happily engaged to another, she pitches herself into the sea, preferring to succumb than to take his life in exchange for her old one.”

“Why you like the grim ones is beyond me,” the demon interjects, but the angel barrels right through, hands, knees and spine fully engaged in reaching the moral of his tale. 

“Then it mustn’t be worth it, I told the dear fellow! To lose your home, and your life, and all you have ever known for someone who cannot love you back. It’s clearly a rotten bargain!”

The demon considered the situation, how much it was wise to share or give away. 

“Perhaps she found the exchange an even one,” he settles on offering.

The angel swirls on his side of the bench, their knees bumping awkwardly, unexpectedly, through layers of bespoken wool. “Excuse me?! How on earth could that be?!”

The demon tilts his head away, to the meager garden, to the statue honoring some fallen soldiers no one remembers the names of anymore. 

“Perhaps the mermaid didn’t give her life away,” he says carefully. “Perhaps she exchanged childish ignorance for precious knowledge.” 

Sliding his eyes a fraction, he tries to gauge an impression of the angel through tinted lenses, but all he can gather is the feel of him, agitated, dissatisfied, and a little bit hungry. 

“Perhaps,” the demon hesitates, “she didn’t die as much as she was set free. ”

It wasn’t an interpretation he expected an angel to understand, and yet it still bothered him when the angel exclaimed, much louder than strictly advisable for polite conversation, 

“She lost her voice! Her lovely tail!” Self-consciously, the angel touches the void between his shoulder, where white wings silently slept. “No no no, how could she _ever_ find happiness in such deprivation!?”

Looking away, the demon crosses his legs and pushes the dark-rimmed glasses farther into his face. It was a grim one alright. It might even rain.

"You learn to make do,” he grits. 

 

*****

 

They don’t see each other for some sixty odd years, until they are sitting together on a crowded opera house, the red velvet of the seats hot under their silk cravats and brocaded evening jackets. 

“How exciting!,” the angel breathes out. He smells of lavender and old books, and the demon reminds himself to turn away, towards the young blonde lady sitting on his left. “All his plays have such evocative titles! ‘Earth Spirit, ‘Spring Awakening’… they are all so very—“

“Sensual?,” the demon can’t help supplying.

The angel immediately clears his throat, sits back in his chair, hands locked over his thighs.

“Not what I had in mind, no,” he counters primly.

“No. I would imagine you never do.”

“You are in terrible spirits tonight. We could have rescheduled if—“

“And wait another half century for the privilege of a quick dismissal? Why would I ever?”

The angel stood up. The demon pulled him back down. By the cuffs of his sleeves, not his hands. Never his hands.

“Sit down and enjoy—”, the demon gestures wildly at the stage.

“—you,” the angel interrupts, and he sounds so earnest and pained the demon folds his hands on his lap, smoothing over his program. “I only came here to see _you_.”

A world of problems lives right beneath his ribs and just below his navel. If the demon wanted to cause a world of hurt all he had to do was let them all free.

Instead, he quips breezily over his shoulder, “That’s not true. There’s singing and dancing, and we both know you’d go to great trouble for both.”

The demon feels the angel’s eyes on him, but by then he has decided on not giving an inch, not yearning a mile. His best friend is a kind, compassionate soul with a perchance for rich foods and fine fabrics and he should remain just so. Encased in the lightest of sins. 

Eventually the lights go dim and the orchestra grows somber, and the unspoken words are lifted, away and onto the stage. 

 

*****

 

They meet the following week, and again, and again, always at the opera house, always for some flamboyant production filled with occult undertones, and the demon would be lying if he didn’t admit a certain fondness at the angel’s delight. 

They sit in adjacent seats until they move to a medium-range box, “a trifling splurge,” the angel calls it, and the demon smiles in spite of himself. 

It resumes normalcy, or as much as is expected to feel settled between two entities who seldom see eye to eye but often seem attached at the hip. 

It’s that restored warehouse of ease that enables their enjoyment of the thrilling music, allows it to slither under their skins and rise in their guts until it trickles down to their fingertips. 

They are both drumming on their shared armrest, almost perfectly in sync, when it happens, when their hands slip together, hammering the same D-note, and instead of staying put or scudding away, they keep rubbing the sliding scale of exquisite notes on the back of each other’s palms until, until their breath is so loud it papers over the melody and one of them must have turned first and grabbed the other’s hand, tight, bone-breaking tight, whispering “oh” like an unwelcome surprise, like an adolescent secret, buried and sick and wanted. 

The demon finds himself staring, taking off his mother-of-pearl lorgnettes to stare, which is something he promised himself never to do, never since the Northern English battlefield, don’t take off protective gear, don’t look an abyss in the eye, but he does, because what else when you have so little to lose, what else but go hunting for a new cliff to fall from, a new hill to bleed on, what else but while the violins hike all around you, go and stare at a new impossible. 

Which means they both stare because the angel tends to be a bit of a follower when it comes to executions and rainy days.

He looks panicked, not unpleasantly so, the white of his hair pale enough to wipe out his features, a stitch of pain or discomfort pushing at his lips. 

The demon intends to pull away but finds himself pulling at their bunched hands instead.

“Angel,” he pleads from somewhere deep and very very dark. 

And the angel closes his eyes and whispers, “Do you think it’s worth it?”

Of all things an angel could ask, he goes and chooses the one demons have no dominion over. 

“I don’t know,” he whispers back, anxious, regretful, because it won’t do to lie. Not anymore, not to an angel, not even if the truth isn’t going to bear him any solace. “Probably not.”

The angel stays still, slightly folded over the armrest. To his credit, he does not dither, does not act frightened or flustered when he bows down and kisses the demon on the cheek. 

“Next week, same time?,” he murmurs with voice bright and flat like a flaming blade. 

The angel sits back, placing both hands square on his knees, and the demon manages to look straight ahead until the lights come back on. 

He writes himself a speech about the twisted corruption of self-deprivation, nearly stepping into a quagmire of Christian martyrdom but expertly avoiding it last minute, a speech he has almost committed to memory when he feels the air change between them. As if, he thinks without humor, an angel had slipped through their cracks, sucking the oxygen out of carbon. 

And after that, it is there, visible like a scar, or a souvenir or—no, be honest—like a stain, and the demon feels tenfold the urge to lie. 

“Your hair,” he blurts out instead, shriller than anticipated. “A wisp of it turned—”

On cue, a curl comes loose as the angel turns to face him. It tumbles between them: black as night, black as petrol. Black as sin. 

The silence that follows is so steep, the demon could hear lovers weep twenty miles down the road.

Surprisingly, they manage to walk out together and exchange pleasantries on the sidewalk. 

Much unsurprisingly, there are no more outings for the rest of the century.

 

*****

 

“Do you think 'good' is something you _do_ or something you _are_?”

The angel is slumped on the black modern couch, his cheeks streaked with soot, his hair once again immaculately white. He looks defeated, on edge, exhausted, down to the way his toes curl on top of each other.

“I don’t know, angel. Both?”, the demon replies from across the room. “I thought I was the one with all the questions.”

The angel shrugs, miserably dragging a hand across his ruined waistcoat. “Loss does strange things to one’s mind.”

“You didn’t lose anything,” the demon sits next to him, trying to make light of something quite heavy. The end of times, the beginning of freedom. “All is just as it always was. Your shop, your body, your life.” And he almost catches himself before saying, softly, his hands moving of their own accord, “Your hair.”

The angel turns and it feels cold all of a sudden, in the room and in his own body too.

“I am sorry,” the demon is ready to spit, has a whole century-old speech prepared actually, but then the angel is smiling and shaking his head.

“ _You_ are good.”

The demon snorts, the memory of black wings twitching under his skin, “Good is certainly something _I am not_.”

“Then perhaps goodness is neither something you are or do, but rather something you choose,” the angel preens, and tipping forward, presses their lips together.

It hurts, like a minor electrical shock, a chemical misfire. The demon rears back, his mouth full with smell.

“Don’t do that!” he heaves. The angels sits patiently, hands steepled in his lap, a picture-perfect rendition of nothingness. 

“Why not? I have wanted to for a good part of a century.”

“It’s not good!” The demon gets up, spins around, feeling something breathing over there, on his blind spot. The angel is still poised on the couch, properly untouched, when he looks back. He tries again, “It’s not going to do any good.”

The strangest aspect of kindness is perhaps how willful it can be. 

“Come here,” the angel commands, and it occurs to the demon that the powers of temptation must not be proprietary to Hell, because he feels the shape of the angel’s desire like another living presence, pushing him across the room. 

“If I do, you don’t leave,” the demon scowls, stepping forth. 

“I won’t,” the angel promises, his voice a garland of smiles.

“You won’t disappear.”

“Nope.”

“Nor turn to dust, or clouds, or snow, or whatever it is your lot does when it wants nothing to do with mine.”

“No,” the angel stands to cup his face. He leans in once again, whispering into his lips, “No hell, no holy water, no wild horses will ever—”

“Oh shut up,” pulling the angel that last inch in, kissing him hard and first and last, (first and last he tells himself, it must be first and last, what else could it be, miracles are just like lightning, striking only once, and once and for all). 

He instructs his hands to stay above the waistband, but having taken leave of his senses in favor of his body, the demon quickly finds his hands under fabric, and then on skin, and then under the skin, clawing around the angel’s ribcage until he can feel it, the heat and heft of it, his heart, an angel’s heart, hung and hot like a sun-kissed apple. 

For a moment, it suffuses him, the stuttered rabbiting of an organ, the angel’s and his, beating in unison. I could crush it, he thinks, I could wrap my fingers around it and pluck it right out of his chest. It would be in my nature, within my purview. 

But then the angel moans, shaky and small, and that sulphuric undernote of pain is enough to have the demon drop his hands to the angel's shoulders, to have him rake his hair and scalp and neck as if checking for injuries, and there’s a thunderclap of panic (did I break him? is he stained on the inside now? can I make him forget or wish it away?) before both their bodies become slick and bare, and his panic spreads wide and deep enough to swallow both of them whole.

Mechanics, in love like in war, create the distance that allows acts, slaughter, the mindless, mindless ravage, to take place. 

“Do you want me inside you?” the demon asks abruptly, both hands on the angel’s chest, avoiding to look anywhere but there, at his overlapped hands, at the smatter of freckles dusted on the angel’s collarbone. They might soon be burnished down to iron, blackened with guilt. “Or do you prefer the other way around? Or perhaps—“

“Yes,” the angel volleys without hesitation, and the demon looks up, to where the black curl cuts through the whiteness of his forehead.

“You don’t even know—"

“Of course I do,” and there’s a phantom thread of pride, of smugness, in the angel’s amusement.

“Were you always this sharp and just played dull?”

The angel frowns. “No. Not exactly.”

He can't help it then, even if he wanted (which he doesn't): he loops the black lock around his index finger. 

Under him, the angel shudders. 

“You kept it?”

“What could I do? Wish it away?”

“You could paint over it,” the devil suggests, wrapping an arm around the angel’s back, forcing them to curl side by side, like a book with hinges.

“Sometimes I did,” the angel admits, shifting closer, nose to ear. “But I always knew it was there anyway.”

The demon turns that over in his head. Knowledge, the things you decide to learn and those you happen to forget. 

The night is turgid with humidity and all the windows are open. He can smell every inch of the angel, inside and out, and there’s a myriad of secrets there, kept from both of them.

“Does it frighten you?” 

The angel seems to mull that over as well. 

“Yes,” he nuzzles, lips wet from kissing and wanting. It’s quiet but for outside traffic and the whirring of the air conditioning turning on. “I am not very brave, all things considered.”

The demon cranes, but he can’t catch the angel’s eye. He worries they may have changed colors already. He wants and does not want to check for coal specks.

“Is it because of me? Of who I am?”

The angel fondles a line from windpipe to navel and it hurts again, a burning itch like being sliced open with a particularly sharp knife. 

“No. Well, that too, but not just.”

“We could _not_ —"

The angels props himself up and kisses him slowly, with tongue and teeth and at least one hundred years worth of gospel. It isn't much, but it’s something.

“I have always fancied the way you smell,” he murmurs, close enough that his features are an iridescent blur.

“Oh? Brimstone and cheap scotch?”

“Upturned earth, and very very human.”

“Should I take that as a compliment?”

The angel sprawls on his chest, a lukewarm, constant, immaterial pressure.

“You may if you wish.”

“I won’t," the demon sneers, fanning the angel's hair. "I _do_ know better.”

“Then you are more foolish than I thought.”

His blond hair, his beautifully young hair, the demon thinks mournfully, shall be harvested with sunspots in the morning.

“No, just cautious. One of us must be.”

“I never thought caution would be your division,” the angel tuts sunnily. “I’ll have you know you are a very reckless driver, my dear.”

“Ah, but you see, I am never carrying anything of worth.”

The angel lifts his head, the disarray of fine curls and white light an impossibly lovely sight. 

“And now?”

The demon strokes them again, the dimpled crow's feet, and the hollow of his throat, and the ridge on his back, and the dip between his legs. He wonders if it’ll rub off on him, the whiteness, its blind ignorance and honesty. 

“Now? Rather precious cargo, an angel’s wings.”

“Well well well,” the angel blushes, ducking away. “Make sure to keep them then, or dispose of me entirely.”

“I will keep them,” the demon presses into his mouth, his chest, his groin. “If it’s all the same to you."

 

*****

 

There’s no sleep, but their hands are linked together, held vertically above their chests. 

“How does it feel?,” the demon asks, flexing his fingers around the angel’s.

“Tentative. Fragile.”

“Do you like it?”

“Physical intimacy?,” the angel cants his head.

“No. Love.”

“Oh I wouldn’t know.”

“Right. No, right,” the demon stammers, the words stopping him dead in his tracks, their lucidity final and cutting.

“I have never fallen, you see,” the angel adds, studiously, seemingly unable to sense grief.

“No, of course you didn’t.”

The angel turns in his arms, back to the mattress, and the demon follows, settling on his side. Incapable of letting him go.

“How did it feel?," the angel asks the inky ceiling. "Falling. To you.”

“It did not feel like this.”

“This?”

“Love. To me. This is.”

The angel tenses, and with him the air, space, time continuum contract into one claustrophobic prick-point. 

“Oh right,” he musters at last. “Well, jolly good. It’s what demons do, right? Gather knowledge? Spread it around in the shape of temptation? And apples. Apples are rather—“

The demon holds him closer, tighter, silencing, attempting to tell a celestial being that there’s a tether, that a body can be a tether, if you want. If you love it enough. It can be.

“I am glad you haven’t fallen,” the demon purrs, burrowing in. 

“Are you?”

“It would be a shame to have you—,” he pauses, winces, tries again, “gone?”

“Would I be gone?”

“I don’t know. Reassigned? Decommissioned? Changed?”

“I think the word you are searching for is ‘dead’.”

“You can’t die!”

“Of course I can,” the angel admonishes sensibly. "I mean, I can be erased. Disassembled. Turned into sea spray.”

“Like the mermaid?”

“Quite so.”

“That’s a rotten bargain,” the demon sinks deeper into their embrace, the toes brushing against his calves uncoiling long forgotten burdens. “Your wings for a roll in the hay with someone you cannot love back.”

“Hmm,” the angel ponders. “Or perhaps it would be an even exchange.”

“No, it can’t be.”

“Can’t it?”

“I have fallen, angel. _Twice_. I should know.”

“Perhaps you can’t know.”

“Ah! Because I’m so lowly, so close to the ground, my love must be covered in muck?”

“No. Because your wings have been clipped so long ago you forget what it means to offer them up.”

“Please,” he whines into the crook of a relentless, reciprocal heat, where no one can see his eyes change colors." _Please_. Don’t fall.”

The angel puts a hand on his nape, trying for comfort but landing on pity. 

“I won’t.”

 

*****

 

One night the demon finds the angel awake and undressed, perched on his office chair. The moon hits the hair pinched between his fingers, the platinum shockingly light next to a new row of black curls. 

“Black is not the color of evil, is it?,” the angel muses, brittle, flat, airy, and the demon wants to push him inside his chest where no one would ever find his bones. “It's the color of knowledge.”

“Yes,” he nods, leaning on the desk. “I know.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?,” the angel laughs but the demon can’t tell if it’s a happy one.

He charges in, suddenly incapable of standing still, away, even if every atom in the universe tells him to keep his damned hands to himself. 

“Perhaps it’s not too late,” the demon fires, fast, feral, too fast and too feral to be comforting, his hands coming to hold the angel’s face up, to force him to look him in the eye. “Perhaps we can still—“

“It’s late,” the angel stands, patting him on the shoulder, “I should wiggle home.”

In spite of their differences, they do try not to lie to one another. 

And yet, lying alone in bed, the demon finds impossible to believe that, only a moment ago, he had gone searching for the angel to tell him most of his pubic hair had just turned white. 

That, like many other things, seemed doomed to remain a secret he would carry inside until its rot flourished into a beguiling apple-tree. 

 

*****

 

The bell chimes, echoing through the sun-bleached bookstore. Dust dances in the air, and a smell like bleach lingers with it.

“How have you been?,” the demon bustles in, debonair, an illusion performed so often it has become second skin.

“Oh you know,” the angel answers from behind the counter, not lifting his head from a leather-bound book. “Soundly engaged, busy as usual.”

“Can I tempt you with a homemade supper?,” the demon offers lightly, brushing lint off book spines. “There are oysters.”

“Though that sounds rather nice, I’ve been well advised not to trust your kind.”

“My kind?”

“Why! Hell conspirators? Consorts of Satan? Crawling creatures of the darkness?”

The demon freezes with a hand midair, blinks, before striding forward and slapping the book shut.

“I haven’t the faintest what you are on about, angel, but get in the car. I haven’t seen you in two full weeks. I miss you. Is that what you want me to say? Fine. I miss you. I miss you desperately. Are you happy?”

The angel sighs, stepping back and looking away. There are crumbs dotted around his chin. Bored, he looks. Bored and a little bit peckish. 

“Why would I be happy? You seem rather forward and rude and decidedly not interested in rare books.”

“Angel.”

The angel finally meets his glare, and there is no amusement in his features. Just pale frosted annoyance.

“I do have a name, and would certainly prefer if you addressed me with less familiarity since I have no interest in being seen fraternizing with your sort.” 

It dawns on him then. The angel did smell different: lemony, pastier, sterile like a hospital room. 

Oh no, what did they do to you, my love?, the demon thinks but cannot, will not, say. 

Instead, he leans over the counter and, lowering his voice, asks as gently as he can,

“Angel. Do you remember the mermaid?”

The angel whips back, flinching, his nose crinkling in bouts of alarmed displeasure and confusion.

“What on earth are you talking about? Fairytales are not our specialty in case you’ve failed to read the inventory up front. Now, will you leave me alone, you peculiar creature?”

The demon straightens up, takes him in. The white hair and the white skin and the white suit and eyes so guileless they are near white too. 

“Right,” the demon taps his forehead, turns to the door. “Wrong shop. My mistake.”

“Certainly,” the angel retorts stiffly, but when the doorbell chimes, his eyes are already lost to the book.

 

*****

 

“You again?”

“I couldn’t help noticing your hair.”

Awkwardly, the angel smiles, tucking the fallen strands back behind his ear.

“Oh. That. A crass little quirk—”

“No it’s not.” The demon crosses the bookstore in two strides. He’s behind the counter in one. “It’s beautiful.”

The angel leans away, instinctively, like an animal sensing danger. 

“Oh! Hmm, yes, well, God’s design and all that. Can’t question their mysterious ways—”

“No, that's not God’s plan,” he thunders and the angel jumps back, hands flying, cuff snagging on a shelf. “They don’t get to claim that too.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We made that,” the demon stabs forward. “You and I. We made love too.”

The angel blanches, from the tips of his fingers to the tip of his nose. 

“Heavens! What on earth—!? You must be mad! Do they let mad demons run around now—well, I guess madness must have been invented by the lot of you, so—“

Lurching, the demon grabs both forearms, shaking, shaking him, shaking them both.

“I love you. Come back. Please let him come back," he screams at the ceiling, the skies, the stratosphere, beyond. "You can take me instead. God, I am not good or kind or even sparingly valuable, but if he remembers, perhaps—perhaps I— _we_ can—“

“Dear fellow! Do get a hold of yourself!” 

Still trying to break free, the angel's voice grows milder, soaked in compassion. Like it should be, the demon supposes. Frenzy is for lovers.

“Listen, I—I must—I imagine I could—,” the angel fumbles for a while before capitulating, “Oh do go into the back. There’s a small room with a glass cupboard on the left. Do help yourself to—

“—the 16th-century apple brandy? I thought we had finished that last summer.”

Silver eyebrows shoot up, and just like that, alarm and suspicion have returned, poisonous and foul-smelling.

“How could you know—“

“You fell in love with me once,” the demon rushes, both hands clasping the angel’s disbelieving face. “You _did_. And I loved you back. So very terribly, and quietly I imagine. Perhaps too quietly. They stripped that away, took it down for parts. Not mine though. I remember everything. I guess I should. Torment and all, that’s fit for my lot. But I remember. You gave me your wings for safekeeping, and I gave you my heart—see?” His fingers trip on the black denim as he undoes the buttons at the edge of his waist. “See, my hair is white here, right where your mouth made it so.”

“What?! I—I can’t _possibly_ —much obliged but I must insist—oh dear,” the angel sways against the counter, clutching his head. “This, all _this_ —it's just—all’s going a little too fast for me.”

Helping the angel onto a stool, the demon crouches between his legs. 

“You don’t have to believe me,” he eases in. “Perhaps you can remember,” he nudges. “If you try,” and by then he is begging.

“Why would I want to remember _a demon_ I supposedly—?”

“Not me, you idiot,” he bites testily. “ _Love_. Perhaps you can remember that.”

The angel held himself very still, his pink lips pursed in thought. He looked ageless then, grass-fed and unsure and so very breakable. 

“Will it stain?”

Desperate, the demon throws his hands up in the air, “Maybe? I don’t know, probably.”

“Will you leave?”

“No! Never.”

“What if I don’t remember?”

“Never.”

“What if I remember and ask to forget?”

“Then I will stay where you can’t see me.”

The angel pauses, looking down at the hand that has crawled up his bare foot to cradle its heel. It feels momentous, the angel’s gathering of unnecessary breath.

“Crowley,” he whispers at last, barely above sound. “Will it hurt?”

A lie instantly manifests on his tongue. The demon drops his eyes to the angel's toes. They seem unable to stop shaking.

“I think so yeah,” he exhales. "Likely."

“And is it worth it?”

“Oh god yes.”


End file.
